Shoki Coe


Shoki Coe was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, erstwhile principal of Tainan Theological Seminary and director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches. Through the Theological Education Fund, he is widely known for his coinage of the notion of "contextualizing theology," later better known as "contextual theology," which argues for theology's need to respond to the sociopolitical concerns of a local context.

Name

His name reveals several layers of complexity in his own sense of identity. He was given the name Chang Hui Hwang at birth, a name he published under in 1968. However, the name he chose to publish under in the 1970s and 1980s was Shoki Coe, the Anglicized version of his name in Japanese, reflecting the context of the Taiwan of his birth under Japanese rule.

Education

Coe studied at Taiwan High School, the former version of National Taiwan Normal University between 1931 and 1934. It was the only school that could connect to tertiary education during the Japanese colonial period. He pursued a BA in Philosophy at University of Tokyo and finished in 1937. In 1938, he obtained a scholarship to study theology at Westminster College, Cambridge and stayed at the home of a Taiwanese missionary, David Landsborough.

Family

He married Winifred Saunders, a Bristol native, in 1944 in the United Kingdom. Together they had four children - David, Michael, Eileen and Andrew.

Writings